Governments started the space age. Now, billionaires and private firms are reinventing it. Guest host Steve Levitt explores what the past can teach us about a high-stakes future. (Part two of a two-part series.)
SOURCES:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president and fellow at Google, C.T.O. of technology and society.
Rosanna Hoffman, head of space law, policy, and sustainability at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
Alex Macdonald, former first chief economist at NASA, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Will Marshall, co-founder and C.E.O. of Planet Labs.
RESOURCES:
"The mission to create a searchable database of Earth's surface," by Will Marshall (TED, 2018).
The Long Space Age, by Alex Macdonald (2017).
Planet Labs A.I.
EXTRAS:
"Should A.I. Move to Space?," series by Freakonomics Radio (2026).
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At first it sounds ridiculous. But it might be inevitable. Guest host Steve Levitt talks to a team that hopes to push A.I. infrastructure off the planet. Part one of a two-part series.)
SOURCES:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president and fellow at Google, C.T.O. of technology and society.
Travis Beals, senior director of product management at Google, Project Suncatcher lead.
Will Marshall, co-founder and C.E.O. of Planet Labs.
RESOURCES:
What Is Intelligence?, by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (2025).
"Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design," by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Travis Beals, Maria Biggs, Jessica V. Bloom, Thomas Fischbacher, Konstantin Gromov, Urs Köster, Rishiraj Pravahan, and James Manyika (Google, 2025).
Reason, by Isaac Asimov (1941).
EXTRAS:
"Are Our Tools Becoming Part of Us?," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024).
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Kevin Weil, the previous CPO & Vice President of Science at OpenAI, joins Speedrun to discuss the future of AI, scientific discovery, and startup building.
After helping build products at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, Weil is now focused on one of AI's most ambitious applications: accelerating science itself. He explains why modern AI models are beginning to solve problems that sit beyond the frontier of existing human knowledge, and how advances in reasoning, coding, and autonomous research could reshape fields ranging from mathematics to medicine.
The conversation explores scientific discovery, robotic labs, AI agents, product design, startup opportunities, and why the current wave of AI may create entirely new categories of companies. Along the way, Weil shares lessons from scaling products used by billions of people and explains what founders should understand about building in a world where AI capabilities continue to improve at an unprecedented pace.
Resources:
Follow Kevin Weil on X: https://x.com/kevinweil
Follow Speedrun on X: https://x.com/speedrun
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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(0:00) CEOs Andrew Feldman (Cerebras) and Will Marshall (Planet Labs) join the Besties!
(2:05) Both CEOs on going public: Impact on employees, customers, and business operations
(13:18) Timelines for datacenters in space
(19:28) Cerebras business breakdown, AI's impact on the silicon market
(24:45) How Founder/CEOs think about liquidity on the road to going public
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Open Source bi-weekly convo w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on all things tech, markets, investing & capitalism. This week, recording from the Coatue East Meets West stage, they welcome OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to discuss all things OpenAI. Enjoy another episode of BG2!
Show Notes:
Coatue EMW 2025 Slides
Produced by Benny Beausoleil
Music by Yung Spielberg
Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com
Follow:
Brad Gerstner @altcap https://x.com/altcap
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Kevin Weil @kevinweil
BG2 Pod @bg2pod
Kevin Weil is the chief product officer at OpenAI, where he oversees the development of ChatGPT, enterprise products, and the OpenAI API. Prior to OpenAI, Kevin was head of product at Twitter, Instagram, and Planet, and was instrumental in the development of the Libra (later Novi) cryptocurrency project at Facebook.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
1. How OpenAI structures its product teams and maintains agility while developing cutting-edge AI
2. The power of model ensembles—using multiple specialized models together like a company of humans with different skills
3. Why writing effective evals (AI evaluation tests) is becoming a critical skill for product managers
4. The surprisingly enduring value of chat as an interface for AI, despite predictions of its obsolescence
5. How “vibe coding” is changing how companies operate
6. What OpenAI looks for when hiring product managers (hint: high agency and comfort with ambiguity)
7. “Model maximalism” and why today’s AI is the worst you’ll ever use again
8. Practical prompting techniques that improve AI interactions, including example-based prompting
—
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Where to find Kevin Weil:
• X: https://x.com/kevinweil
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinweil/
—
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Kevin’s background
(04:06) OpenAI’s new image model
(06:52) The role of chief product officer at OpenAI
(10:18) His recruitment story and joining OpenAI
(17:20) The importance of evals in AI
(24:59) Shipping quickly and consistently
(28:34) Product reviews and iterative deployment
(39:35) Chat as an interface for AI
(43:59) Collaboration between researchers and product teams
(46:41) Hiring product managers at OpenAI
(48:45) Embracing ambiguity in product management
(51:41) The role of AI in product teams
(53:21) Vibe coding and AI prototyping
(55:55) The future of product teams and fine-tuned models
(01:04:36) AI in education
(01:06:42) Optimism and concerns about AI’s future
(01:16:37) Reflections on the Libra project
(01:20:37) Lightning round and final thoughts
—
Referenced:
• OpenAI: https://openai.com/
• The AI-Generated Studio Ghibli Trend, Explained: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/03/27/the-ai-generated-studio-ghibli-trend-explained/
• Introducing 4o Image Generation: https://openai.com/index/introducing-4o-image-generation/
• Waymo: https://waymo.com/
• X: https://x.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
• Planet: https://www.planet.com/
• Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama
• A conversation with OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil, Anthropic’s CPO Mike Krieger, and Sarah Guo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkvVZua28k
• OpenAI evals: https://github.com/openai/evals
• Deep Research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/
• Ev Williams on X: https://x.com/ev
• OpenAI API: https://platform.openai.com/docs/overview
• Dwight Eisenhower quote: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/dwight_d_eisenhower_164720
• Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder & CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons
• StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet
• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
• Four-minute mile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile
• Chad: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-3F100ZiIe-chad-open-a-i
• Dario Amodei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Julia Villagra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliavillagra/
• Andrej Karpathy on X: https://x.com/karpathy
• Silicon Valley CEO says ‘vibe coding’ lets 10 engineers do the work of 100—here’s how to use it: https://fortune.com/2025/03/26/silicon-valley-ceo-says-vibe-coding-lets-10-engineers-do-the-work-of-100-heres-how-to-use-it/
• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
• Windsurf: https://codeium.com/windsurf
• GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot
• Patrick Srail on X: https://x.com/patricksrail
• Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/
• CK-12 Education: https://www.ck12.org/
• Sora: https://openai.com/sora/
• Sam Altman’s post on X about creative writing: https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115
• Diem (formerly known as Libra): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
• Novi: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/05/welcome-to-novi/
• David Marcus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmarcus/
• Peter Zeihan on X: https://x.com/PeterZeihan
• The Wheel of Time on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Wheel-Time-Season-1/dp/B09F59CZ7R
• Top Gun: Maverick on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Top-Gun-Maverick-Joseph-Kosinski/dp/B0DM2LYL8G
• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/unconventional-product-advice-alex-komoroske
• MySQL: https://www.mysql.com/
—
Recommended books:
• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI: https://www.amazon.com/Co-Intelligence-Living-Working-Ethan-Mollick/dp/059371671X
• The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On: https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Ten-Years/dp/1538767341
• Cable Cowboy: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Cowboy-Malone-Modern-Business/dp/047170637X
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
—
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Kevin Weil is President of Product and Business @ Planet and Operator in Residence @ Scribble Ventures. In the past, Kevin has been Head of Product at Twitter, Instagram, and Novi (the digital currency effort within Facebook). During his seven years at Twitter, he helped the company scale from 40 to 4000 people and from $0 to $2B in revenue. He then moved to Instagram in 2016 to lead the product and data teams and led through an inflection point as Instagram grew from 400M to over 1B users, including launching Instagram Stories. Kevin then co-founded Diem (formerly known as Libra) and Novi and built both for three years before moving to Planet in 2021. If that was not enough, Kevin is also on the board of Strava, the Nature Conservancy, and the Black Product Managers Network.
In Today's Episode with Kevin Weil We Discuss:
1.) Lessons From Leading Product for Instagram and Twitter:
What does Kevin believe makes Instagram so inherently good at product? How did leading product for Instagram change the way Kevin thinks and operates?
What are 1-2 of Kevin's biggest lessons from working with Kevin Systrom, Instagram's Founder?
What are the biggest takeaways for Kevin from leading product at Twitter?
2.) Launching Products, Customer Discovery and Product Sessions:
What were Kevin's biggest learnings from launching Instagram stories? How did Kevin's conviction impact the product building and success of Instagram stories?
How does Kevin advise founders on the best way to approach customer discovery? What are the best questions to ask to reveal the truth?
How does Kevin approach product testing today? Why does Kevin not like softly softly testing new products?
3.) Kevin Weil: Leadership 101
What are some of the biggest leadership mistakes that Kevin made in his time at Twitter?
How does Kevin approach decision-making frameworks? How does one balance the speed vs the quality of the decision?
What makes a great product strategy? Where do so many go wrong in their product strategy?
How do the best leaders communicate with their team? How does this change over time?
What is Kevin's preferred medium and style of communication with his teams?
4.) Kevin Weil: The Athlete, Father and Husband:
Kevin is an ultra-marathon runner, what does his training routine look like?
What 1-2 changes has Kevin made that have had the biggest impact on performance?
How does Kevin manage, investing, advising, training and being a father and husband?
Kevin Weil is the ex-head of product at Twitter and Instagram. He's currently the president of business and product at Planet. Weil joins Big Technology Podcast to share an insider's view of how Twitter and Instagram build products, what their potential is, and how each product is dealing with big, imposing, outside forces (Elon Musk and TikTok). Stay tuned for the second half, where we discuss Planet, a fascinating company whose hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth capture a new, complete picture of our world daily.
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In 2010, rocket scientists Robbie Schingler and Will Marshall set an ambitious goal for themselves: to launch an aerospace mission with the speed and agility of a Silicon Valley startup. They set up shop in their garage, left their NASA jobs, and began pursuing their vision of building small, relatively inexpensive satellites to take daily images of the earth. Today, their company Planet has a fleet of roughly 200 satellites that capture millions of pictures daily, tracking everything from forest fires and oil spills to the health of coral reefs and crops. The company now has hundreds of clients around the world, and just went public on the NYSE.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
My guest today is Will Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Planet. Will founded Planet in 2010 with a small team of NASA scientists to build a constellation of satellites that would image the entire Earth every day. Since then, Planet has successfully built and deployed 450 satellites into space, which the company is using to create a time series of images for every place on Earth.
Our conversation covers the untold space story. How space is going through an internet moment where cost reductions and performance enhancements have led to a seismic shift in what’s possible above our atmosphere, and how that can drastically improve life on Earth through unique datasets like the one Planet is piecing together.
Once you listen to Will speak about Planet’s progress and mission, it’s hard to think of a more underappreciated company in business today.
Please enjoy this great conversation with Will Marshall.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
[00:02:57] - [First question] - His thoughts on the renaissance of the space industry
[00:05:09] - The earliest days of Planet and why he started the business
[00:09:22] - Unique data units captured by their satellites
[00:13:35] - The real estate of space and interesting angles to consider
[00:15:59] - How customers interface with Planet and their early use cases
[00:20:57] - Thoughts on the sovereignty of space and the laws that exist currently
[00:23:43] - Figuring out the dynamics and pricing of Planet’s business model
[00:27:34] - Examples of stress and tensions when working in space
[00:29:08] - The future of privacy and concerns we should have there collectively
[00:30:29] - Five different types of satellites and their functions
[00:31:39] - The most sci-fi potential futures that Planet may unlock someday
[00:32:54] - Indexing the Earth and using data to train machine learning algorithms
[00:34:02] - What he’s learned about Earth that is most surprising
[00:37:12] - Contributing factors to a 70% decline in life on the planet in 40 years
[00:38:35] - Ways that going public might impact Planet’s long term goals
[00:40:23] - The hardware story of building various prototypes of satellites
[00:42:18] - How much is built in house versus outsourced to fabricate their satellites
[00:43:48] - Complimentary space trends that are compounding beyond imagery
[00:45:32] - Whether or not they plan on making their data open-source
[00:47:15] - Democratizing their data and allowing other companies to build on top of it
[00:48:30] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
What if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new project: using AI to index all the objects on the planet over time -- which could make ships, trees, houses and everything else on Earth searchable, the same way you search Google. He shares a vision for how this database can become a living record of the immense physical changes happening across the globe. "You can't fix what you can't see," Marshall says. "We want to give people the tools to see change and take action."
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